Monday, March 25, 2013

Veronica Mars Movie

Update: in the early evening of 3/25/2013, @robthomas replied to say he had missed other tweets and would look into captioning and that it was a "great idea." Now he says the digital download of the movie will be captioned, and announced that publicly, but still trying to get him to caption the pitch video too. Another update (3/26/2013), @robthomas now says he is working on getting the pitch video captioned also.

Veronica Mars was a show on television for a few years. In its afterlife, it has developed a cult following. A couple of weeks ago, the producer, Rob Thomas, launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to produce a movie. Warner Brothers is covering the cost of marketing and distribution but that is all; all production funds are coming from the Kickstarter campaign.

The problem with this Kickstarter campaign which is at http://kck.st/Z1HJRR? No captions on the "pitch video" which is a video that is used by people seeking funds. PLUS there are no captions on TheWb.com episodes of Veronica Mars at http://www.thewb.com/shows/veronica-mars/. AND someone on Twitter informed us that while there is a DVD, one of the seasons is not captioned on the DVD.

Why is this so important? It is important because the Veronica Mars campaign has broken records on Kickstarter. It was the fastest ever to raise $2 million. As a result, it got oodles of publicity in the media. Hearing people are tweeting up a storm about Veronica Mars and continuing to donate. It is probably very active on Facebook too.

The success of the Veronica Mars campaign is inspiring more to follow in its footsteps. In fact, the sites Kickstarter and Indiegogo are now playing a major role in the funding of various video projects, whether web television shows or regular films. Therefore, these campaigns represent one of the best opportunities we have to change attitudes about closed captioning.

If we can get them to closed caption their pitch videos, they will be more amenable to captioning the actual video/film projects. (Please note the Veronica Mars movie will be available digitally as well as in limited theatrical release.) The idea is that if we can convince them to caption while still "pregnant," before they have even picked up a camera, we have a better likelihood of the project being captioned when it is "born."

So if you are on twitter, send a message to @robthomas and @imkristenbell asking for captions on the Veronica Mars pitch video. We have been tweeting ourselves, but the producer is not responding, perhaps because it is only one of us doing the tweeting. We need for more of you to do the tweeting or Facebooking. (Remember, in numbers, there is strength.) There's only 18 days left, but it is not too late. If you are not on twitter, you can also contact the producer via Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/VeronicaMars.